"Grandma," Six-year-old Dakota Gormley said, "What's God's phone number?" Why do you want His number? Gwynn Forbes asked. "I want to phone God to ask him to send daddy back down."

The reality of death is hard enough for a grown adult to accept, much less a six-year-old child. The message of Easter is that though the pain of death is real, it is temporary.

Phillip Yancey wrote: "If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life."

—Phillip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Dave Bootsma

1 Corinthians 15:55 "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"

Back in the 80's, the 1880's that is, Nietzsche declared that "God is dead," and before the turn of the Twentieth Century, Shaw and Wells chimed in saying the 20th Century would mark the end of the world's "religious phase."

Yet, a church now meets in Russia's Museum of Religion and Atheism—the former center of atheism. Nearly half of the United States' population attend Worship on a regular basis while revival is sweeping through Latin America and Christianity grows behind China's iron curtain. (Reader's Digest, Dec. 99, p. 63-64) Illustration by Jim L. Wilson

Nietzsche, Shaw and Wells have long since decayed in their graves, and God continues to live!

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard told a parable of a powerful king who fell in love with a beautiful maiden. There had never been a king like this king. Every other ruler trembled before his power. No one dared breathe a word against him. And yet, this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maiden.

How could he declare his love for her? The very things that made him king made him inaccessible to the maiden. If he went to her little cottage in the woods with his escort, the armies, the coaches, the banners waving, it would overwhelm her. If he took her to the palace, clothed her in royal robes, crowned her with jewels, seated her at his banquet table, she might come to say she loved him. But how could he know if it were true love?

So the king left behind all that was kingly-the robes and crowns and escorts and banners and armies. He disguised himself as a beggar, and came to her door in the woods, all alone, to try and win her heart.

This is the Incarnation-"Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant…" (Phil. 2:6-7)

Lee Strobel is a Teaching Pastor at Saddleback Valley Community Church in Southern California. In his book, God's Outrageous Claims, he shares his own pilgrimage to Christ. He wrote, "I used to consider the Resurrection to be a laughable fairy tale. After all, Yale Law School had trained me to be coldly rational, and my years of sniffing for news at the Chicago Tribune had only toughened my naturally cynical personality. But intrigued by changes in my wife after she became a Christian, I spent nearly two years systematically using my journalistic and legal experience to study the evidence for the Resurrection and the credibility of Jesus' claims to being God. I emerged totally convinced and gave my life to Christ …"

A German broadcast corporation intentionally posted a hoax video of Michael Jackson on the Internet as an experiment aimed at showing how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories spreads. The company RTL posted a video that purportedly showed Michael Jackson, who died over a month earlier, emerging from a coroner’s van. The video was YouTube for one day.

During that day, it generated 880,000 hits. Though RTL removed their phony video after the first day, several other web sites around the world picked it up. RTL spokesman Heike Schultz said, “We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the Internet with hoax videos, therefore we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead --- and the response was breathtaking.”

Hoax video of Michael Jackson creates online stir, http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jXawU2mwt1Xh3ksUIKcsekupDiYQD9AEP1UO0; September 2, 2009, Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

People can be gullible. Hope needs to be grounded in something of substance. Our hope is in Jesus Christ who did rise!

1 Corinthians 15:17-19 (CEV) Unless Christ was raised to life, your faith is useless, and you are still living in your sins. And those people who died after putting their faith in him are completely lost. If our hope in Christ is good only for this life, we are worse off than anyone else.

A new study from the Barna organization indicates that as American society becomes more religiously diverse; there is more confusion over what the Easter holiday is all about. When asked what Easter meant to them personally, a majority of Americans said they believed there is a spiritual connection to Easter, but few link the holiday with the Christian faith’s belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Overall, 42 percent of Americans said Easter signified the death and return to life of Jesus Christ. Only 2 percent described Easter as the most important holiday of their faith. Small percentages in the survey said Easter was about the birth or rebirth of Jesus Christ, or the second coming.

Age and political inclination played a role in people’s understanding and celebration of the Easter holiday. The types of Americans who were most likely to express some type of religious connection with Easter were evangelicals, church attendees, and born again Christians.

Survey Director David Kinnaman, said, “Most Americans continue to view the Easter holiday as a religious celebration, but many of them are not clear as to the underlying reason for the occasion.” He added, the most disturbing thing uncovered by the survey was that even those who celebrated Easter as the resurrection of Jesus were not likely to invite non-churched friends to attend with them, suggesting personal beliefs had not “translated into a sense of urgency for having spiritual conversations with their acquaintances.”

--Most Americans Consider Easter a Religious Holiday, But Fewer Correctly Identify its meaning, http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/13-culture/356-most-americans-consider-easter-a-religious-holiday-but-fewer-correctly-identify-its-meaning; March 15, 2010. Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

Acts 10:39-41 (ESV) “And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, (40) but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, (41) not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”